ASH3002y Reading Assignment
January 25, 1999

As you read and look at the following materials, think about how the "New World" is represented int these texts.  What do these writers and artists notice, and what do they emphasize in their accounts? Consider as well the differences among the various materials.  What different kinds of things do you learn from written texts (and from different kinds of written texts), from drawings, from archaeological sites, and from reconstructions?

Dispatches From the New World (required reading):

• Letter from Giovanni da Verrazano to King Francis Ist, July 8, 1524 (available on course homepage in "Documents")
  
• Dispatches from Roanoke by Arthur Barlowe (1584), Thomas Harriot (1585) and John White (1587) (in Baym, Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th edition, volume I, pp. 67-88).
  
• John Smith, The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1616) (NA 102-119).

Pilgrims' Passage (required reading):

• William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (1856) (NA 164-191)

Useful Web Sites: 
(Check these sites out, and spend time where you find interesting material.  Please pay particular attention to the DeBry engravings.) 

• Theodor De Bry's Grand Voyages:  Early Expeditions To The New World -- http://www.philaprintshop.com/debry.html
  
• Columbus and the Age of Discovery -- http://marauder.millersv.edu/~columbus/
  
• University of Georgia Map Collection -- http://www.libs.uga.edu/darchive/hargrett/maps/maps.html
  
• Jamestown Settlement -- http://www.apva.org/
  
• Plymouth [Old Plymouth Plantation] --http://pilgrims.net/plimothplantation/
  

Useful Secondary Sources:
(Optional reading, available on reserve.)

• Samuel E. Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, 500-1600 (Oxford, 1972)
  
• D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, I: Atlantic America, 1492-1800 (Yale, 1987)

Additional Visual Materials for the Intrepid:

• John White's watercolors made in Virginia in 1585, in Stephen Lorant, The New World:
  The First Pictures of America (1946) , pp. 185-224.

• John Smith's "Map of New England" as reprinted in Phillip Barbour, ed., The Complete
  Works of John Smith (UNC, 1978)

Finally, the Moby-Dick assignment of the day:

• Read Andrew Delbanco's introduction in the Penguin edition of Moby-Dick, as well as "Etymology" and "Extracts."  Think about how Melville incorporates texts by European explorers.  Consider as well the connections that Delbanco suggests between the whaling ship and the United States and/or America.  How might these connections fit into our explorations of American Studies this semester?